After all those hours spent playing other people's adventures,
the time has come to create
some of your own. Thomas Green takes a look at the do-it-yourself package from Gilsoft.

Although the scenarios of adventure
games differ widely, their worlds
always comprise a series of locations
and a number of objects, some of
which have to be found by the player
and assembled in a specified location.
Hidden workings present various puzzles; in one classic adventure (said to
be the granddaddy of them all) you
have to catch a bird to get past the
serpent, but you can't catch the bird if
you're holding the black rod. Far
more elaborate situations can and
have been devised - the art, in fact,
is to set puzzles of the right difficulty
- but most of them depend on discovering combinations of objects, on
carrying out appropriate actions in
certain locations, or on performing
specified actions within a limited
number of turns.
The player controls the game by
typing commands: 'GO EAST',
'GET ROD' or 'CATCH BIRD'.
The computer usually replies along
the lines of 'OK' or 'I CAN'T'; particular situations may evoke longer,
more descriptive messages - 'THE
BIRD FLUTTERS AWAY FROM
YOU AND SITS SINGING JUST
OUT OF REACH'. As each new
location is entered, the computer describes it and lists any objects (coins
and jewels, for example) that may be
visible. These objects can be picked
up or dropped, sometimes worn, and
so on.

WHAT'S ON THE MENU

Big adventures contain many hundreds of rooms and dozens of
messages. They cannot he written ad hoc; you need a systematic approach
and a database that records, for
instance, which objects are where,
etc. The Quill supplies just that.
There's a convenient menu-driven
database Editor, which allows you to
create or amend the locations, the
objects. the messages, and the events
taking place in response to the

player's commands. When the database is ready to be tested, the Interpreter runs the adventure, keeping
track of the player's commands.
Finally, when the adventure is complete it can be saved as a stand-alone
program, with facilities for saving and
restoring games and keeping the
score.
Entities in The Quill's database are
linked by numbers. For instance, each
message has a number; 'THE BIRD
FLUTTERS AWAY FROM YOU'
might be message 3. The bird itself
might be object 13, and the black rod
might be object 20. At the heart of the
system, the Event Table will describe
how to interpret the command
'CATCH BIRD'. It will do so using
tests, such as PRESENT 13 ('Is
object 13, the bird, present?') or
NOTCARR 20 ('Is object 20 not
being carried?), and actions such as
MESSAGE 3 ('Print message number 3'). These are all combined in an
'Adventure' language like this:

The Interpreter responds to the player's
command 'CATCH BIRD' by scanning the Event Table and checking the
conditions for each possible interpretation of the words. As soon as it finds a
possibility in which all conditions are
met, the specified actions are
performed.
The Event Table is supplemented by
a Movement Table, which handles

unconditional movements or single-word
actions, such as North or its synonym
'N', and a Status Table which checks
the current state after each turn, and will
perform any actions whose conditions
are met. Numbered flags can record
past events, such as having eaten an
apple; all the more interesting and unexpected parts of an adventure are likely
to make heavy use of flags. There are
particular flags which record the number of moves taken, whether the light is
on for example, and there are a number
of flags which are automatically decremented on each turn. These might be
useful, say, if the player triggers the fuse
on a bomb and is allowed five turns to
reach safety.
The systematic approach is clearly
far better than any ad hoc efforts are
likely to be. Moreover, the Editor makes
it simple to change the text describing a
location, the movements from a location, the Status and Event Tables, and
so on. Hard copy on the Spectrum printer is easily produced.
Although essentially designed for
text adventures, The Quill permits
user-defined graphics and provides
changes of INK and PAPER colours,
bleeps, and pauses. The code is very
speedy, with no waiting for even the longest room descriptions. "Well over 200
locations" are allowed, and small adventures will run in the 16K Spectrum
(although The Quill itself needs 48K).
Some of the messages from the Interpreter seemed a little ponderous and, in
most instances, I would have preferred
the laconic 'What now?' to the boring 'I
am ready for your instructions'. The
messages use 'I' by default; a special file
switches to 'you', but not consistently.
A pity the user can't tailor them.

THE QUALITIES OF
QUILL

In its own terms, The Quill is without
doubt exceedingly usable, with its speedy
editing and testing of adventures and
unusually clear documentation. While
testing adventures, a diagnostic table

THRILLS FROMT H E Q U I L L

can be displayed to show the current
location and the value of each of the
flags, thus you can work out why something didn't do what you expected - a
facility that makes debugging a much
easier task. One small quibble though:
all built-in scoring is in percentage
terms, which means if you add a bit
more to the adventure you have to

adjust the existing scores.
Working with The Quill certainly
helps warm imagination's wings, and
there's an impressively wide variety of
worlds to accompany the adventures in
Gilsoft's pipeline. But, despite my admiration for the system as it stands, it
tends to encourage rather 'noddy' results - mainly because the Interpreter
fails to allow actions that would surely
have been quite easy to include. It
would have been nice, for instance, to
perform an action if A is true OR if B is
true; move an object from one location
to another; set a flag; print the value of a
flag (for example, 'YOU HAVE ONLY
x TURNS LEFT BEFORE THE
EXPLOSION'); change the

description of a room after an event; and be able
to GET any object present, without
further specification (this would allow
me to construct a version using single
key pushes only, for younger children
who can read but not yet type - if Atic Atac can do it, so can The Quill).
Although a number of these requirements cannot be met at all, some, like
the OR, can quite easily be but with a
clumsy and inscrutable result. Others,
such as moving an object, or changing
the description of a room, demand a degree of ingenuity; making an animal
follow you seemed at first impossible
until the mysteries were explained to
me. (Hint: you have to make it both a
message and an object.) Ingenuity is

This example is a rather short adventure game based on the Bird/Rod saga in classic adventures. The game has only two rooms and two objects but serves to show the way adventures are built up. All the basic information is stored in a set of tables - messages, location descriptions, possible

movements and so on. The Vocabulary Table lists all the words the game understands - most of these are predefined by Quill. Finally, the actual 'program' is the Event Table which, using the other tables, dictates how the game responds to the player's commands.

THRILLS FROMT H E Q U I L L

fun, but slow to create and sometimes
tricky to debug.
These features would allow more
sophisticated worlds and more interesting relationships. As it stands, The Quill makes it easier to hide a torch in
one arbitrary place and a battery in
another than to create a world with a
lunatic logic; easier just to make the
player die and be forced to start again
than to create bizarre but comprehensible events. Two Quill-written adventures came with the test package -
Magic Castle and Diamond Trail -
and both fell into that 'Snakes and Ladders' trap.
By keeping the Interpreter language
simple, however, the authors have
made sure that it's highly compact and
very easy to learn. It's just a question
of balance.
Another problem is that despite the
excellent Editor and the diagnostics for
testing adventures, the structure of the
database is not far removed from that of
machine code, because of all those
inflexible numbers linking things together. You can't use the command
MESSAGE "HARD LUCK"; you

have to store 'HARD LUCK' in the
Message Table, note the message number x, and use the command MESSAGE x. Similarly, the separation
between unconditional movements and
conditional - handled respectively by
the Movement Table and the Status
Table - obscures the structure of the
adventure, making it more difficult to
develop interesting and unforeseen
happenings - and easier to introduce
inconsistencies. The problem is particularly acute with flags. Flags have
numbers, not names, and their relationships are distributed through perhaps a
substantial number of entries in the
Event and Status Tables; these are very
difficult to grasp in their entirety. The
result is that new inspirations are very
hard to work in while creating an adventure, and modifying an existing one is
more difficult still.
In short, The Quill is 'first-generation'. It's a great improvement over
run-of-the-mill adventure programs,
but we can expect the next generation to
offer increased levels of comprehensibility and modifiability. One can anticipate symbolic names for flags, a structure that allows 'events dealing with the
bird and the rod' to be treated as a unit,
and being able to edit the interpreter
messages. And there'll be adventures
for foreign language speakers, adventures for younger children, educational
adventures for teaching foreign languages, and adventures describing how
to use computer packages.

Compared to the general level of
software documentation, the instructions and information that accompany
The Quill are undoubtedly excellent. A
52-page A5 booklet describes the design
of a small but well-chosen adventure
that exhibits most of The Quill's features and explains them clearly enough
for anyone to understand; it then goes
on to give a detailed account of every
part of the system. Grammar, punctuation, spelling and proofreading are very
accurate (something it would be nice to
take for granted, which is hardly the
case with many manuals).
It would have been helpful had the
author given novice adventurers a little
more guidance in some of the recognised tricks of the trade - how to set up
a maze, or how to make an animal
follow the player from place to place.
Gilsoft says it is considering producing
a book on the craft of adventure-writing;
let's hope so ... it might make good
reading.

ALL IN ALL

Setting up an adventure demands resources rather like those needed for
writing programs - plus the added
ingredients of creativity and wit. It also
takes a long time, but if you want to give
it a try then The Quill at £14.95 is a
robust, well-documented and very usable system. But beware ... if you
thought playing adventures was addictive, just try writing them!